Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Author: Carrie

  • We are the people

    There’s been a really nasty outbreak of everything-ism over the Coronavirus and people’s reactions to it. A tweet from the comedy programme Have I Got News For You today was a good example: it captioned a photo of people queuing too closely outside ASDA as “natural selection in action”. The replies included lots of comments about the people in the photograph being “sheep”, a few swipes at some of the shoppers’ weights and in one particularly horrible comment, a description of how someone should park a tank in the car park and machine-gun the shoppers.

    I find it hard to believe that anyone from HIGNFY or any of its social darwinist commenters hasn’t been to at least one supermarket in the last week and bought more than their usual shop or stood within two metres of strangers. But that’s different, isn’t it? They’re not like those people.

    And that’s true. They’re not. They were able to stock up – not panic-buying, no, just getting a few essentials just in case – because they had a car and a credit card and the freedom to shop when they first started to worry.

    They didn’t have to wait to finish a series of shifts or for a meagre pay cheque or for their universal credit payment before they could get a bus to queue with the others to walk past bare freezers, the contents long moved to the chest freezers in suburban garages, the shelves showing the last known location of the multiple packets of rice and lentils currently sitting in oh so many tasteful kitchen cupboards.

    Just because you panic-bought quietly before everybody else started doing it doesn’t make you morally superior. I know I’m not: I bought some extra food before the freezers emptied and the rice ran out. And I also know that had one client not paid me last week, I’d have been queuing up with everybody else outside ASDA.

    It’s a similar story with the elevation of people in parks to national hate figures on social media. How dare people without gardens of their own use public parks after being told to do so by the Prime Minister?

    Those people are us. Yes, some people are idiots – but idiocy isn’t limited to a particular social class, income bracket, waist measurement or postcode, as contrarian columnists and rent-a-gob politicians frequently demonstrate. Most of us are trying to navigate terrifying times with inadequate information, vague and often contradictory direction and a flurry of misinformation in social media and in parts of the mainstream media too. Sometimes we’ll make bad decisions. Sometimes we’ll panic.

    Don’t rage against people going to parks when the government told them to go, and when it won’t stop employers demanding many more non-essential workers cram into the Tube every morning. Don’t blame the panic buyers when the government leaks lurid tales of lockdown to the press and then unconvincingly denies them the next day; don’t blame people for besieging shops when all the online shopping slots are booked solid for six weeks by the worried well. Don’t blame the pubgoers when the PM’s own dad says a pint is your human right and the commentariat tells you it’s your national duty.

    There will be a time to rage, and there will be people deserving of your rage. But not now. And not those people.

  • When empires collapse

    A fascinating piece in Mother Jones by historian Patrick Wyman.

    The fall of an empire—the end of a polity, a socioeconomic order, a dominant culture, or the intertwined whole—looks more like a cascading series of minor, individually unimportant failures than a dramatic ending that appears out of the blue. Carts full of olive oil failing to arrive at some nameless fort because of a dysfunctional military bureaucracy, a corrupt official deciding to cook the books and claim taxes were collected when they really weren’t, a greedy aristocrat bribing that official instead of paying his bill, an aqueduct falling to pieces and nobody willing to front the funds to repair it.

    …Historians will look back at some enormous disaster, either ongoing now or in the decades or centuries to come, and say that it was just the icing on the cake. The foundation had already been laid long before then, in the text of legislation nobody bothered reading, in local elections nobody was following, in speeches nobody thought were important enough to comment on, in a thousand tiny disasters that amounted to a thousand little cuts on the body politic.

  • “Lazy contrarians are putting everyone at risk”

    Alex Andreou, writing for Politics.co.uk:

    I fully support Peter Hitchens and Brendan O’Neill’s inalienable right to be infected with a deadly virus. If they existed in a vacuum, I might buy myself one of those big foam fingers and cheer them on, as they march to the extinction that is the destiny of every dinosaur.

    But they don’t exist in a vacuum. They have no more a ‘right’ to keep congregating in pubs than they have a right to set fire to their flat on the ground floor of a skyscraper. Not following guidance, not distancing socially, doesn’t just imperil you. It is something that imperils my friends, my loved ones, everyone. Nobody has a right to put others at risk.

    … the very talking heads who have been, for some years now, telling everyone else to rediscover the Spirit of the Blitz, were revealed to be the morons who refused to turn their light off during a blackout and endangered their entire neighbourhood.

    It’s becoming very clear who the real “enemies of the people” are.

  • “There’s something quite transcendental about making love with a dolphin”

    Just because it’s the end of the world doesn’t mean there isn’t plenty of stuff to laugh at. This, from the Mirror, had me in tears.

    Man had sex with a dolphin called Dolly for a year – and claimed she seduced him

    Almost every paragraph has a killer line, such as:

    “At first I discouraged her, I wasn’t interested. After some time I thought ‘if this was a woman would I come up with these rationalisations and excuses’?”

  • Free videos for schoolchildren from the BBC

    BBC Teach has thousands of free videos, mapped to the curriculum, for primary and secondary schools. It’s a fantastic resource for parents that also offers advice to those of us suddenly and unexpectedly running a school in our homes.

  • Free audiobooks for children

    Audible, the Amazon-owned ebook service, is offering free audio stories for children for as long as the schools are closed. 

    It’s a pretty good selection, ranging from classics such as Winnie the Pooh and White Fang to more contemporary Audible originals. I think it’ll come in handy on a rainy day.

  • A bag for life

    This is my bag. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

    My bag is an Animal, canvas and khaki. It was a present from my daughter nearly three years ago, a happy gift during a sad time.

    Since then my bag and I have been inseparable. It has felt my nervous hands shake in doctor’s waiting rooms and seen me bounce around stages and dance floors. It has transported red wine into dry venues, sweets into cinemas and home comforts into hospital wards.

    My bag has carried birthday presents and bottles of pills, iPads and injections, capos and co-codamol, hairbrushes and hand sanitisers, wine and wigs. It’s been to museums and to meetings, to parks and parties, to solicitors and salons. The badges it has worn so brightly, the rainbows and unicorns and statements and slogans, have brought me many Subway smiles, knowing nods and sour stares.

    Like me, my bag has seen better days. Its back is threadbare from years against my hip, its khaki green dyed blue from a parade of new blue jeans. Its straps are worn and twisted, the little love hearts that hide underneath the fabric faded by friction. And like me, it has started to take shapes its creator surely never imagined.

    I have another bag ready, another Animal. It’s like my bag, but it isn’t my bag. Not yet. But I know that it’ll soon be time for me and this bag, my bag, to say goodbye.

    If my bag could talk, if it asked me, “was I a good bag?”, how would I answer?

    I’d answer:

    Yes, you were a good bag.

    You were my bag.

  • So long, and thanks for all the fish

    (Update: the dolphin photos were fake news: the images are from Sardinia where our marine mammal pals are regularly spotted. But the sentiment still stands)

    I’ve given up trying to predict the things that make me cry these days. The latest ones were images from Italy showing the now-clear water teeming with fish and even dolphins.

    The water has cleared up because there aren’t so many humans zooming around and churning up sediment, but the photos also reminded me of the satellite images of Coronavirus-hit towns and districts across the world: where previously they sat under a permanent cloud of man-made pollution, the pollution is gone.

    It sometimes feels as if Covid-19 is Mother Nature giving us the mother of all hints: if this is how you’re going to behave, I’m better off without you. Coronavirus isn’t the end of the world; it’s a teaser trailer for the bigger, more frightening versions that are coming if we continue to pursue a model of economic growth no matter what the consequences.

    The dolphins also reminded me of this, by the late, great Douglas Adams.

    Curiously enough, the dolphins had long known of the impending demolition of Earth and had made many attempts to alert mankind to the danger. But most of their communications were misinterpreted as amusing attempts to punch footballs, or whistle for titbits, so they eventually gave up and left the Earth by their own means – shortly before the Vogons arrived. The last ever dolphin message was misinterpreted as a surprisingly sophisticated attempt to do a double backwards somersault through a hoop, whilst whistling the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’. But, in fact, the message was this “So long and thanks for all the fish”.

  • Murdoch and Netflix won’t do this

    Earlier this week the BBC explained what it’s going to do to help during the Coronavirus crisis. The short version: a lot.

    Here’s just one part of it, the education section:

    In the event that schools are shut down, and subject to further work and discussions with the Department for Education, devolved administrations and schools, we are exploring:

    1. A daily educational programme for different key stages or year groups – with a complementary self-learning programme for students to follow, broadcast on BBC Red Button and made available on demand on BBC iPlayer.

    2. Expanding BBC Bitesize content, with our social media running daily troubleshooting Q&As focusing on a different subject each day.

    3. Increasing our educational programming on BBC iPlayer, bringing together the best from BBC Bitesize, BBC Teach and the wider BBC portfolio where educationally appropriate.

    4. Creating two new daily educational podcasts for BBC Sounds, one for primary and one for secondary.

    5. BBC Four and BBC Red Button devoting a block of programming each weekday evening to show programmes that support the GCSE and A Level curriculum. In Scotland, the Scotland channel will support the Scottish NQs and Highers in daytime.

    I’m not privy to the internal conversations or plans of any part of the BBC. But I do know as a contributor there’s a ton of work going on behind the scenes to ensure that the output is relevant, necessary and useful to people during this very difficult period.

    Imagine a world where the right-wing press gets its wish and the BBC no longer exists in its present form. Can you imagine Netflix stepping up like that? Sky? In the US, Murdoch’s Fox network is going to have blood on its hands for its Coronavirus denial: while around 70% of US news consumers are rightly worried about the crisis, that falls below 40 for Fox News viewers.

    Like the NHS, there’s a lot to criticise about the BBC. But like the NHS, it still remains a national treasure.

  • Ice Ice Baby

    There are lots of good causes hoping for your attention and your cash right now, and I’d like to mention one that’s close to my heart: The Ice Box arts and music centre in Glasgow. It’s struggling and without financial help it may not be able to re-open its doors.

    They’re raising money here.

    The Ice Box is special for all kinds of reasons. It’s not just a venue, although it’s a good one. It’s a non-profit that gets books and toys to kids who need them, runs special events on themes such as men’s mental health and women’s rights, helps local homeless people and provides an accessible, affordable and safe space for local artists. And it’s particularly special to me because it’s where I walked on stage as me for the very first time.